Operating system choices have become less important ("people care about higher level stuff")

The Free and Open Source movement has lost its traction

Linux (stacks) ha(s|ve) become much more complex

In this article, I want to point you, old greybeard, to some hope at
the end of the tunnel: Devuan.

Devuan

So let's start with a self centric, barefaced advertisement so that you don't
claim I wrote this article to subconsciously lead you to Devuanhosting.com:
Go to Devuanhosting.com and get yourself a Devuan VM, if you like Devuan.

Now, back to the real topic of the post: You might see Devuan as a
"Debian of the retarted people who don't accept the existence of systemd".
Fair enough.

However, you should look a bit more closer, even if your opinion is the former.
Devuan creates a choice. It gives you the choice to run Linux without systemd.

Just for the sake of the argument before, ("people care about high level stuff"),
it is actually important that this is about an init system at the core of your
computer. Yes, it is low level. Yes, most people don't care and most people probably
shouldn't care, because they don't even understand why there is an
init system, nor why it can be programmed very simple (i.e. compare
with cinit).

What is important here is that a group of volunteers spending
their free time and resources commits themselves to fight for the
right to have a Linux without systemd.

"Why is that important", you might ask. And the answer is very
similar: without these people, we would all still be using a DOS based
operating system with a broken GUI on top of it.

Yes, exactly. If there weren't such volunteers (or even "lateral thinkers")
before, there would not be GNU/Linux distribution for you at all.

Yes, exactly. It takes 3 commands to install this property of your
system. It is a very clean separation of concerns, and debugging this
setup is as easy as starting acpid in the foreground and showing the
events.

While this, as well as the logical naming of devices (eth0, wlan0),
is just a minor thing, I see that something changed:

There are again people, who fight for their right to do things "the
right way".

Call to action

If you agree to what I wrote above and you also see the light on the
horizon, I would like to ask you to be active:

It is not necessary to start developing code to support the Free and
Open Source Software movement, to support freedom.

For us, it is necessary to be seen and move forward as a community,
may it be Linux, BSD or FOSS in general.

So instead of staying abstract like this, I ask you to do 2 things:

Spread the word about this article on IRC, Twitter, or social medium
of your choice

Get yourself a good drink of your choice, sit down and say out
aloud: I am supporting freedom of choice and will fight for it.